Mr. Lewis provided for the Kensington Institute exactly the library he would have acquired for himself, if he could have afforded it. The result, for all real lovers of books, would have been delightful if any of them had known of it But the name frightened them away, and they never went there. Members of the general public were also deterred by the name of the Institute—though for quite different reasons—and folk of Mr. Podley's own mental attitude were too illiterate (like him), to want books—"pure" or otherwise—at all.
Podley, again after consultation with his wife, appointed a clerk from the Birmingham pin works as chief librarian. "It won't matter," that shrewd woman had pointed out, "if he knows anything about literature or not! His duties will be to supervise the lending of the books, and a soft job he'll have too!"
A Mr. Hands had been elected, a limpet-like adherent to Podley's particular shibboleth, and a person as anæmic in mind and body as could have been met with in a month of search.
An old naval pensioner and his wife were appointed care-takers, and a lady-typist and sub-librarian was advertised for, at thirty-five shillings a week.
Rita Wallace had obtained the post.
Hardly any one ever came to the library. In the surge and swell of London life it became as remote as an island in the Hebrides. Podley had endowed it—it was the public excuse for the knighthood he purchased in a year from the Liberal Party—and there it was!
Rita Wallace had early taken entire charge and command of her nominal superior—the whiskered and despondent Mr. Hands. The girl frightened and dazzled him. As he might have done at the foot of Etna or Stromboli, he admired, kept at a distance, and accepted the fact that she was there.
The girl was absolute mistress of the solitary building full of beautiful books. Sometimes Hands, whose wife was dying of cancer, and who had no stated times of attendance, stayed away for several days. Snell and his wife—the care-takers—adored her, and she lunched every day with them in the basement.
Mrs. Snell often spoke to her husband about "Miss Rita." "If that there Hands could be got rid of," she would say, "then it would be ever so much better. Poor silly thing that he is, with his face like the underside of a Dover sole! And two hundred a year for doing nothing more than what Miss Rita tells him! He calls her 'Miss'—as I'm sure he should, her being a Commander's daughter and him just a dirty Birmingham clerk! Miss Rita ought to have his two hundred a year, and him her thirty-five shillings a week. Thirty-five shillings! what is it for an officer's daughter, that was born at Malta too! I'd like to give that old Podley a piece of my mind, I would!"
"In the first place he never comes here. In the second place he's not a gentleman himself, so that don't mean nothing to him," Snell would say on such occasion of talk.